Beyond The Engagement Buzz – What your Professional Service Firm actually needs to know about connecting online

Communication has truly evolved in the modern day business world. Beyond traditional megaphone approaches, professional services firms today communicate with their audiences in numerous ways - and all this is not happening instantaneously. To measure this, many marketing observers have begun looking at engagement as the critical method to reach out to, and connect with firms target audiences.

While some people might consider “engagement” a buzz word, it’s really a concrete way to measure your marketing reach. Professional services firms are spending countless hours and resources to create content, promote them and measure the engagement generated through their campaigns.

Still, to really talk about – and then measure – engagement, you need to move beyond the various misconceptions surrounding the term “engagement” and understand what engagement really is.

For example, you must align context with any engagement outreach strategy. Without the element of context around business goals and what is important for users and how users would want and need to interact with the brand online, we will never be able to measure true engagement.

New Video on Practical Engagement Strategies

To help clients get their arms around what matters – and what doesn’t – in the realm of online engagement, we created an on-demand video. Join Daniel Huss, the Director of edynamic’s Strategy Group, as he will walk us through what your professional service firm really needs to know about creating and measuring your content and analytics.

Here are some excerpts from this 45-minute deep dive into the world of professional service engagement:

On The “Typical” Online Interaction

A user begins the conversation by coming to the website – we get information about what they like (hopefully).

Based on that information, we create more information that they might like – then the user reads the new information – then we tell whether they like it or not and we begin the conversation funnel all over again.

We attempt to get as personal as possible but this conversation may take days, weeks or months depending upon how we are actually measure those cycles.

This is not an instantaneous cycle, it creates a feedback loop via their behavior within the digital world. And it generates a lot of information.

On Measuring Outcomes:

We are actually generating a large set of data, but all data is not important, we as marketers need to know a smaller chunk of this information, which is important to us. And this smaller chunk of data might not be relevant to other departments.

So basically what we need to measure is outcomes. So instead of using the buzzword “engagement” we need to call it outcomes. We need to measure outcomes based on what we think is important to our business. We need to define what those outcomes are. For example – what do you want your website to do? We need to define that.

On Evaluating Success:

Once we define what the various outcomes are with respect to various digital channels like the website, email, social etc., we need to segment them. We need to define our outcomes in a more segmented way. For example we need to define what your website needs to do for your sales team, and what you want your website to do for your individual practice areas, and for your service offering teams.

Once have your outcomes segmented with respect to your digital channel, then we need to create individual metrics with respect to acquisition, behavioral and outcome standpoints. Measure which email campaign brought how many unique visitors to a particular webpage (this is from an acquisition standpoint).

Then we have metrics on behavioral attributes in terms of repeat visitors and bounce rates. And also most important is outcomes – what is the regency of returning visits and how large was the social amplification.

On Context:

Now once we have the metrics in place – we need to understand the contextual positioning of the metrics we have picked – which means the highs and lows of content consumption or the degree of content consumption.

To do this we need to calculate the averages, the minimums and the maximums of the data that we have. And then compare the data with respect to parameters like time period, shares etc. This essentially measures the impact with regards to benchmarks.